Bonnie Fuller gave a talk at the American Magazine Conference in Boca Raton last fall, which four years ago would have been kind of electrifying, because, whatever you want to say about Bonnie Fuller, she makes things look interesting. You feel vaguely guilty that you’re interested in them, but you’re still interested in them and you pick them up. And yet her influence is so pervasive and so codifiable that Us Weekly is continuing to channel her without her being there, and they’re doing better than Star, which I find comical. The momentum of what Bonnie did can beat her at her own game.

Jumping into the wayback machine (ok, not so far back but it was last century) Michael Wolff‘s 1999 interview with Black in New York magazine is a good read too. From that interview:

What Roger’s vast success says about the people who hire him is more complex. In some sense, the very thing that is annoying about Roger when you’re paying him (that he is off in Milan at the Principessa or in Paris at the Ritz) is what you value him for, too: He’s taken the art out of art director… The fact that Roger himself is not there doing the job you’re paying him for is, in some ways, a relief; you get the name without the ego.